Final Project

I have to say this was the most intimidated that I have been by any assignment so far.  Very little instruction on how to accomplish the assignment was provided.  Question:  Is the Bobwhite-Manatee transmission line placement acceptable and feasible based on the chosen project objectives?  Criteria to be evaluated:  1) Define and quantify Schools (including daycares) within proximity of the transmission line.  2) Quantify homes within proximity of the transmission line.  3) Define and quantify environmentally sensitive lands imposed by the transmission line.  4) Quantify length of the transmission line (cost estimate optional).  Deliverables include:  1)power point presentation.  2) slide commentary for power point presentation. 3)Process Summary.  4) Blog post with links to power point presentation and slide commentary.  (WHAT?!?  I cant do THAT!) 

I spent a few days in what felt like running around in circles.  I explored the data layers that were provided.  Started metadata table, clipped data to study area, and tried to formulate ideas on how to best accomplish the assignment.  Although I did get a better understanding of the data than I had I didn't feel I was making any progress toward the assignment. 

Direction change to formulating the maps needed to accomplish the assignment.  Intersects for environmentally sensitive areas with preferred corridor and 400' buffered line was divided into wetland and conservation. Conservation came together pretty well.  Wetland was too chaotic for me, so I narrowed the classifications to types of wetlands (riverine, lacustrine, palustrine and uplands).  FYI-uplands are the rest of the area that are not one of the 3. So is everything that is not wetland considered an upland?  Not sure. 

Downloaded data for schools and daycares from FGDL.org.  Intersect for these layers with preferred corridor and 400' buffered line.  Another intersect for parcels with preferred corridor and 400' line buffer. 

I had a hard time digitizing homes from the aerial.  Finally I found I had to "create new feature class" rt click geodatabase-new-feature class-name and type. The intersect for the parcel layer with preferred corridor and 400' buffered line was just repetition with differed layers.

The last criteria, length of the line, I did not create a map.  It is the same map as all the others.  I just used the measure tool to drop vertices and continue as close as I could down the center of the preferred corridor.

I will admit I was intimidated and didn't think I knew how to accomplish these things.  I was able to get all the data I needed from the attribute tables for the intersects and the measuring tool for the line measurement.  Not as hard as I thought it would be. 

The next hurdle was realizing that my maps were in portrait layout as that fit the map better, but to use in power point I would probably need them in landscape.  So I changed up the maps.  And then realized when I inserted them to slides it was fine for them to be portrait (learning, learning). 

Write the slide commentary, again have never done it so "oh no, I cant do that".  But I just started writing what I would say and it came together.  Overall - more than a little overwhelming, but how do you climb a mountain?  One step at a time.  I am sure this is not my most professional presentation - but it is a lot better than I thought I could do.

Here is a link to the power point and the slide commentary.
Power Point
Slide Narrative